The technical field of the present invention is the technical field of devices for protecting vehicles, particularly armoured vehicles, from ballistic projectiles, particularly hollow-charge projectiles such as rockets (RPG).
Protecting armoured vehicles from projectiles very often consists in installing, all around the vehicle, a protection device comprising a ballistic protection element spaced apart from the vehicle structure and generally constituted by grids, nets or other openwork devices, the mesh size of which is intended to destroy or neutralize the priming of the projectile.
The operating principle of this type of protection, referred to as passive protection, requires to move the protection element away from the vehicle structure at about 300 mm, more generally between 200 and 400 mm. The integration of such a passive protection device has to be performed so as not to interfere with the basic functionalities of the vehicle, namely the doors having to remain operational.
The vehicles are generally equipped with a door, particularly a rear door, closing an opening and hinged to the vehicle so as to constitute an access ramp for the vehicle in its entirely open position.
When it is desired to protect such a door, there is a problem according to which the maximum opening angle of the door is reduced due to the presence of the protection element which will come into contact with the ground if no means for limiting the opening angle are provided, such contact with the ground being likely to damage the protection element and thus to render the protection device inoperative.
To solve this problem, the French patent application FR 2 958 738 discloses a protection device comprising connecting means and spacing means arranged between the protection element and the door, the connecting means allowing to bring them closer when opening the door, and the spacing means allowing to space them apart when closing the door. In this manner, the protection element can be positioned at a nominal distance when the door is closed, and can be brought closer to the door when opened, so as to be sufficiently spaced from the ground to prevent its deterioration, while allowing to increase the maximum opening angle of the door.
In this protection device, the protection element is carried only by the door, the coming closer together of the protection element and the door is ensured by springs, and the spacing apart of the protection element and the door is caused by the support of struts against a fixed part of the vehicle, around the opening closed by the door.
Although this protection device satisfactorily solves the aforesaid problem, it has the disadvantage of having a relatively complex structure involving a significant number of parts and a meticulous assembly, thereby causing a relative increase of the manufacturing costs.
Thus, there is a need for a protection device having a simpler and industrially-optimized structure with a lower cost, while allowing to automatically bring the protection element and the door closer during the opening of the door and space them apart during the closing thereof, respectively.
The present invention is intended to meet this need by providing a protection device with which the protection element is connected to the door by forming a deformable parallelogram(s) structure, the deformation of which is automatically controlled when opening and closing the door.
The use of at least one deformable parallelogram allows not only to solve the aforesaid problem, but also to provide a gradual and smooth movement of the protection element with respect to the door.